THE HUMMINGBIRD, TWO ACT PLAY CONTINUES, SECOND EXCERPT

EMMA JEAN

Survival. Wanting to survive. Hope that maybe we could survive.

CHORUS

Hope!

MURDOCH

See. See. That is why I had to create her,
my beloved Emma Jean. If this ordeal has taught
me anything, it is that we were not meant to be alone.
Existence makes no sense without the other.
The speaker must have his hearer.
The actor must have his audience. The great duality.

HOMER

Moves stage front, plays drum while dancing to remind us of the rhythm.
Two more weeks of the violence of the sea.

CHORUS

Hope!

MURDOCH

See. See. That is why I had to create her, my beloved Emma Jean.
We were not meant to be alone. The world is not a one.
The world is a two and multiples of two.
We do not exist without the great duality.
We may think we are alone because we may talk to ourselves.

EMMA JEAN

The speaker must have his hearer.
The actor must have his audience.
The preacher must have her someone to preach to.
The teacher must have his someone to teach.
The dancer must have her partner.
The writer must have the great other.


CHORUS

Self and other.

MURDOCH

We are not meant to be alone.

CHORUS

The great duality.

MURDOCH

We are not meant to be alone.

CHORUS

The great each other.

HOMER

Moves stage front, plays drum while dancing to remind us of the rhythm.

Two more weeks of the roll endless role of endless ocean
interrupted by the meanness, violence of unwanted storm
two more weeks of not knowing his exact location,
down to the last fresh water in the fresh water tanks,
down to the last stored food in the galley or the hold,
exhausted, dehydrated, sick, and still full of despair
still missing the noisy, fidgety, always squawking parrot
that presence constantly reminding him “nils desperandum”
“don’t despair, don’t despair, don’t despair,”
starting to hallucinate, seeing himself doing battle with narwhale,
then narwhal transforming into fire breathing sea dragons

Murdoch steps down on to stage front and holding what looks like a splintered mast in a thrust position as in a joust pantomimes a battle with an imagined sea monster.

Murdoch and the wreck that was now the windmill boat
finally made it to a shore and a chance of being saved.
And with him was Emma Jean, soft beautiful other,
she who had helped him remember the gentle things
in the middle of a vast angry seemingly limitless ocean.
And with him was that perfect realist, seasoned veteran,
that PhD in cynicism, in all that could go wrong,
he who loved to berate Murdoch for all the ways he’d failed—
or anyway appeared to fail in terms of his too harsh judgment—
failures and suppositions of failure.

Murdoch exits stage rear center. Ship’s helm and titter-totter are removed off back of stage. Cushioned area stage right front in the form of a combination of rocks and foliage is set up stage front right. This will be used by Murdoch after he reenters stage.


CHORUS

O Calliope, our muse, our inspiration in days when heroes
like Achilles, Ajax, Odysseus seemed strong as mountains
and able to best the most brutal, the most pugnacious of foes
he newly reborn and not knowing how much time or strength
he’s granted, give him the fire, the wisdom to tell this new story.

HOMER

Plays guitar, more rhythmic thumping of the drum, more dancing..

Let me strum my lyre, let me pound my drum as I sing
of the challenges faced by a hero of this new span of time.
Junior, our seaside country observer, told his story well as able
of the plight of Murdoch after being blown from the bay,
but he was removed, had to rely on intermittent reporting
whereas I speak to all the untold spirits of the dead
ever vigilant about the happenings here in this world
and to all who still watch from the empyrean, jaded immortals.
Thus am I the more reliable reporter of events that took place
once Murdoch’s damaged vessel reached the African coast.

CHORUS

O let us sing of Africa, of all the turmoil that Murdoch faced,
and let our emotions stay cool as we speak of the desperation
when his sick craft, The New Paradise, reached that coast.

HOMER

Never would that glorious vessel cruise again.
Murdoch’s dream destroyed on African rocks.
Never would he challenge another schooner to a race.

Murdoch in rags staggers on stage from stage rear. At first he positions himself stage left, speaks to the sky.
MURDOCH

I need something else, some new idea if I am going to save the world.

Ashante and Emma Jean enter from stage rear and position themselves stage left. Ashante has a small rounded covered flask containing liquid which she carries over a shoulder. Murdoch staggers about like a shipwrecked sailor stage right as the chorus continues its narration. Finally Murdoch finds a place to lie down—the area looking like rocks and foliage positioned stage front right.


CHORUS

Out of control, starving, without water, came he crashing ashore
at a smooth place, perhaps by divine guidance, free of jagged rocks.
Using some ropes, still intact, he shimmied down a post,
down to the smooth flatness of stone, of rock, of sand, of soil,
stumbled forward he fell on a bed of seaweed, fell fast asleep.

HOMER

After pounding on the drum.

There on crisp pods, in the hot African sun, slept the inventor,
slept the scion of kings, slept the poet Murdoch McLoon,
slept he who would save the world if only he had the method,
slept creator of boat sporting windmill, sporting dome,
slept he who had lost a very noisy, very screechy parrot,
slept he who lost a boat driven by wind and whirling blades,
slept he who was at first not of sound mind, barely conscious
slept he who did battle with narwhals and sea dragons.

ASHANTE and EMMA JEAN

Slept not far from savanna, not far from cheetah and bongo,
pygmy hippo, nightjar, forest beetle, grey parrot, and giraffe,
slept not far from trees and thick lush forest foliage
slept not far from bougainvillea, heliconia, alpinia, ettingera
in the tropical heat of that relentless African sun.

LUKE

Enters stage rear, moves as far stage front as possible.

Do I smell opportunity or what? This white man says he’s looking
for something new, something to save the world.
Maybe this something to save the world might be good for Luke Invictus,
me! Luke Invictus from a succession of kings of West Africa,
a line of once powerful rulers whose family lost everything
when the Europeans moved in and pushed us out.
Luke Invictus, a man with many many ideas of his own
about how to govern, about how things should be run.

Luke exits stage rear.

Murdoch reenters. Ashante pantomimes with Murdoch the narration provided by Homer and the chorus


CHORUS

Slept deeply, slept our hero, fanned by coastal breezes
when several hours having passed, chanced on near him
a tall dark female from a remnant of the Ewe tribe—
the Ewe, a once proud people, rich in centuries of history
before the era when European speculators and exploiters
used the might of their homeland’s military power
to engage in the ugliness of the trade in people.



Gazing on the exhausted, sunburned American,
still sound asleep, hair entangled, thoroughly wasted,
the young woman felt herself filling with feeling.
This white man had come from a distance, she reasoned.
Then saw she the boat half in water, but land imprisoned,
and it struck her her assumption must be correct.
In a jug she carried bissap, the drink of the region,
reddish drink made of ground hibiscus flowers.
Kneeling, she touched the jug to his lips, then poured.

At first, startled, half choking as he suddenly awakened,
Murdoch soon found the liquid trickling down his throat
as pleasant, as quenching as a spring in the mountains.
Opening eyelids encrusted with salt and burned by sun,
he took some time to focus on the lovely brown face
with dark radiant eyes, sweet mouth framed by smooth skin
hovering within an arm’s length of his prostrate body.

Speaking in clipped English acquired at a British school,
she spoke to him in a voice like the ringing of a soft bell.

ASHANTE

Hello, white man.

CHORUS

She said.

ASHANTE

Where are you from? My name is Ashante,
which means strong African woman
in my native tongue, and what should I call you?”

MURDOCH

Murdoch.

MIND CHECK AS NEW PROJECTS LABORATORY; THE HUMMINGBIRD, FIRST INSTALLMENT

I have decided to change my approach in Mind Check, my blog, to make it more useful for me as an originator of new creative writing projects and to generate interest among those following my writing career in the works in progress that are occupying my mind at the present time. You can look upon what I’ll be doing in the next several installments of Mind Check as a writing projects laboratory where by putting down my latest ideas I’ll have a chance to step back and study them to see if they are going to be productive or not.

For several months I have been working on a play dealing with environmental issues. The working title of this full length two-act play is The Hummingbird. The Hummingbird may be thought of as a kind of sequel to the first book I came out with in 2008 entitled Murdoch McLoon And His Windmill Boat. I’m calling the new work a sequel, but in some important ways it is not a sequel at all.

First of all, The Hummingbird is a full length two-act play whereas Murdoch McLoon And His Windmill Boat is an epic poem arranged in 12 books or chapters. It was not conceived as a work meant to be performed, but of course as an epic poem it could be performed just as the original epic poems attributed to Homer (The Iliad and The Odyssey) were performed—that is, recited or sung in public.

The Hummingbird is designed to be presented not by a single narrator, but by six characters, of which one, not surprisingly, is called Homer and serves as the narrator. The six characters of The Hummingbird are Homer, who as indicated serves as narrator, Murdoch, a poet and inventor, Emma Jean, Murdoch’s lover, Frank, a close friend of Murdoch and really his chief antagonist, Ashante, a beautiful West African princess, and Luke Invictus, a political leader in West Africa and a dedicated opportunist and exploiter.

The play opens with Murdoch on the New Paradise, his windmill boat, in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. The boat is being wrecked by the action of high winds and rough seas. With him are Emma Jean, his lover and inspiration, and Frank, his best friend and harshest critic. Murdoch is facing the hard reality that his invention, the windmill boat, has failed, and he tells us that he is committing himself to coming up with a new invention—that is, just as soon as he manages to get himself ashore.

What follows is the beginning of The Hummingbird, a play in two acts.

THE HUMMINGBIRD

A Play in Two Acts

HOMER

Enters stage rear. He is dressed like ancient story teller bard, blind, has drum and guitar. Pounds on drum to establish a rhythm and bring attention to the stage and himself.

I blind Homer, dead for so long,
in my grave these eons compiled on to eons,
have heard the cry of desperation and have awakened
come back from the dead, risen from the grave
suddenly alive like the Phoenix from the ashes
suddenly alive like some author genius’s monster
zapped with a billion volts of harnessed lightning,
suddenly alive like some god or venerated person
known through the exploitation, the fruits of electricity
who the people can never accept has ever died,
have brought my instruments—lyre and my drum—
and am now ready to tell my story.

CHORUS

As chorus (made up of actors not otherwise assigned in this first scene) takes a position stage front left, Murdoch appears on stage, stage rear center. Murdoch stands at the helm of a ship, presumably the New Paradise windmill boat, which itself is affixed to a titter-totter platform. Wind machine (fan) keeps the air stirred up. Over the sound system is heard the sound of a fierce storm at sea.

Let us sing then again of poet inventor Murdoch McLoon,
he of maniacal energy, he of boat powered by windmill,
he driven by the rage of wind and churned up ocean
from the protection of his schooner filled cove
out into the open, out into the vast wine dark sea…

MURDOCH

Wears kilt, some kind of loose shirt, looks wet and disheveled.

To help those needing help. To feed the starving millions.
Heal the sick. Bring hope to the hopeless. To find an answer
for an overheating earth in which the polar ice caps are melting.
That was my purpose. And now look at me. All day, all night,
fighting the sea. Not knowing if I’ll ever make landfall.
Not knowing if the next huge swell will overwhelm me,
send me and the New Paradise to the briny depths for good.

FRANK

Enters stage left, moves as close as possible to Murdoch at helm of vessel on titter-totter platform.

Serves you right, you who thought you had all the answers,
you with this strange contraption called a windmill boat
which you had the gall to give such a highfalutin name,
New Paradise! New Paradise? New Floating Wreck,
New Flotsam, New Jetsam—now they’re the names for you.

MURDOCH

Shut up, Frank! Remember, down on myself,
filled with dread when first I got washed out to sea
from my home in the beautiful harbor of Golden Cove,
not knowing where I was being blown to,
not knowing if I had a chance for survival
I created you, created you from need, from thought.
You were the figment of all my failures.
You were the embodiment of all the ways
that I was convinced that I had fallen short.
Now I want you to keep your big mouth shut
while I try to get us ashore.

FRANK

Get us ashore? Where? We’re five thousand miles from land.
How do you propose to get us ashore from
the middle of the Atlantic Ocean?

MURDOCH

I want to survive. Don’t you? If I go down,
you go down. We’re both lost.
Somehow we’ve got to get ourselves ashore.

FRANK

Murdoch, how did I get stuck with you—a poet, a dreamer
someone with an oversized imagination, Mister Fantasy Man,
but with not a practical bone in your whole body?

MURDOCH

It’s at a time like this that I need my Emma Jean.

Emma Jean enters stage right, moves just stage right of Murdoch on the titter-totter with ship’s helm.

Emma Jean, my Emma Jean, my beautiful Emma Jean
I created you when sunk to my lowest point.
I created you when what I needed was hope.
I tried to give the world a panacea for the crisis to come.
And then the storm came up. My parrot was torn from a shoulder,
drowned in a seething turbulence, My light was gone.
The wind blew fierce. The water turned hateful and angry.
I’d lost my bearings, could see nothing at all.

FRANK

Hope? Here we go again. Again the silly idealist
is using that four-letter word H-O-P-E hope.
The next thing we know he’s going to be
talking about truth and beauty.
If I’ve told you once—Mister Poet, Mister Inventor—
I’ve told you thousands and thousands of times.
These are all just made-up words to hide
the brutality of what is. This slap-in-the-face,
this howling wind, this mean whipped up surface
that knows nothing of flatness, of quiet, of calmness,
of peace, this rancorous, cantankerous this
always stirred up ocean, now that is what is.
That is honesty. Murdoch, give me honesty.

EMMA JEAN

O give me the world as we want it to be.
Give me the reason to move onward.

CHORUS

Hope!

EMMA JEAN

That is all we mean by hope, the sense of being able
to move toward the something else, the something better,
toward the something else that is the something better…

CHORUS

Hope!

EMMA JEAN

the sense of being able to move beyond ourselves,
the sense of being able to move forward.

Thank you for tuning into Mind Check. For a look at my other writing, see the website http://www.sasaftwrites.com. Please note that my two latest books, Murdoch McLoon And His Windmill Boat and City Above The Sea And Other Poems are now available online. Links to the publisher Xlibris can be found on the sasaft website. You can call the publisher directly at 888-795-4274 ext. 7876 or use the publisher’s website Xlibris.com.

Copyright © 2009 by Stephen Alan Saft

PLAY WRITING; HISTORY OF AN INTERESTING ENDEAVOR. YES, I AM WRITING PLAYS AGAIN.

I wrote my first play in the 1980s, sometime during the second half of the decade. I had moved to Washington DC in 1978 from Maine to join a corporation in the space business, specifically satellite communications, called Comsat, and soon tried to get involved with the poetry scene in that area. Eventually I grew disenchanted with my progress as a poet in Washington DC and began wondering if I might have more success—anyway with what I envisioned as success—with another genre.

I saw myself as having failed as a novelist in the late 1960s and early 1970s, which is what I did with my so-called spare time when I lived in the New York City Metropolitan area, first in Brooklyn and then in central New Jersey. Hence I eliminated fiction as a possibility. What else was left for a failed novelist and a failed poet, but writing plays? That’s how I reasoned out my situation in the mid 1980s.

Eliminated Screen Writing

By the way, I also eliminated screen writing from consideration because I was not living in California and had no relationships with anyone in the movie business. From what I had read in writers magazines and been told by people who struck me as authoritative on the subject, no one made it as screen writer without Southern California contacts, and I didn’t have any.

And so in the mid 1980s I began writing a play. It was about the big tragedy in my life when I was growing up, namely the failure of a family business. Appropriately I named it “The Business.” “The Business” might never have found its way to the stage had it not been for a sympathetic director named Benny Blumenthal who agreed to work with me to get it stage ready and to direct the production. I had been introduced to Benny by a co-worker of mine at Comsat, the satellite communications company, named Anne Armentrout who was using her spare time to run the theatre program at the church.

Arlington County Becomes Sponsor

And so my spotty career in the theatre was launched. The next big event in my theatre history occurred in 1990 when I was able to team up with the Arlington County Parks and Recreation Department to launch a theatre devoted to putting on new works. This seeming act of altruism—creating a means of launching new plays from, for the most part, new playwrights—was, like almost all acts of altruism, full of self interest. My main intention was to create opportunities for myself as a playwright.

As the sponsor of New Works Theatre, Arlington County provided the venue for the production of plays, and it provided important items like chairs, curtains and lights. Even more important, the department was a source of funding for such things as advertising, set construction and props for each production.

Playwright Submissions

To tap into sources for new plays, New Works had only to announce that it was in business with its address for submissions, and the scripts started coming in. I soon found that the greater Washington DC area had more fellow playwrights in it than I ever imagined. To review the submissions, we set up what we called our Artistic Committee consisting of a team of readers, drawn mainly from a community where we once had lived called Holmes Run Acres in Fairfax County.

Wife Harriet assumed leadership of the committee in the beginning, and soon after she would play an important role in our productions by working backstage.

Play Introduction Methods

New Works Theatre employed a variety of production methods to bring its new plays to the attention of the public. In public readings, the actors sat in chairs on the stage and read the parts out loud to the audience. No attempt to act out the parts was made. The main beneficiary of this technique was supposed to be the playwright. He or she could hear how the dialogue sounded and get inspired to make the appropriate changes to improve the work for production.

The next step in the new plays world was called the staged reading. This approach was supposed to help not just the playwright but the production team—director and lighting, sound, sound and props designer, and stage manager. In the staged reading, the actors have more familiarity with their parts than in the public reading, and go through the motions of their character presentation at least in a limited way. Finally, of course, is the full production.

Hold Discussions With Audience

One of the interesting things we did at New Works Theatre was to hold discussions with the audience after a production, whether a simple reading, staged reading or full production. Usually I led these discussions, and we would talk about the central theme of the work as well as whether the audience felt the playwright had been successful and whether the production was effective or not in getting these ideas across.

As I recall, the second full production of New Works Theatre was a play called “The Hot Rocks Rebellion” by this writer. This full length work was about a father and son who end up working in the same fast food restaurant during an economic downturn not unlike the one we are going through today. I had a lot of pleasure writing “Hot Rocks” and being involved with its production, but I was not to have the pleasure of another full length production of my own work during the lifetime of New Works, which came to an end in 1995.

Artist In Search of Home

A short one-act play I wrote called “The Artist in Search of a Home” was produced by New Works as part of a fund raising event, but that was the extent of New Works Theatre’s benefits for the play writing career of Stephen Alan Saft. The duties of running the theatre—the need, for example, of near constant fund raising—became overwhelming. Besides the demands of my real job were starting to become significant. I was then working for George Washington University and was about to undergo a major career shift. My job as manager of marketing for the Division of Continuing Education would soon be terminated, and I would be casting about for something else to do to keep myself on the payroll at the university.

In a future posting to Mind Check, I may get into how I came to start the university’s Interactive Multimedia Program, which is what I did next at George Washington University, but this posting is about how I, a struggling poet, came to get involved with theatre. My purpose in writing it in the first place is to serve as a preamble to an account of why in 2009, many years after my last involvement with theatre and play writing I now find myself writing a play again.

A Sequel to Murdoch

Soon after publishing my first book of 2008, entitled “Murdoch McLoon And His Windmill Boat,” I was struck with the fact that by no means had I said everything I wanted to say and needed to be said about this near buffoon Murdoch McLoon and what he saw as his purpose in life with regard to the environment and the world-wide problems of hunger and poverty. We were then in the midst of the 2008 election campaign and the issue of what the individual person could do about these problems as inspired by the example and powerful rhetoric of Barack Obama weighed on my mind.

The more I thought about these issues the more I felt moved to write a sequel to “Murdoch McLoon And His Windmill Boat.” The new work would pick up from where the existing book left off. Murdoch would realize that a windmill boat could not be an answer to an overdependence on oil, that for one thing whatever solution might be available in technology had to be useful on land.

Huge in Scope

As I worked on it, the concept for the sequel became huge in scope involving seven different parts of the world, each with its own local problems as well as its individual spin on the environmental issue. I selected Homer as the narrator for the story, the father of the epic poetic story in the West—specifically The Iliad and The Odyssey. Soon I became overwhelmed by the grandiosity of my concept. How could I ever write such a thing and finish it in my lifetime? Should I abandon the whole idea as just not doable?

It was then that I remembered the play writing form. The modern play—
and screen play for that matter—has the need for economy of words built into it. If I could transform the new work into a producible work for the theatre, I would have to compress it. Much of my original grand concept would have to be eliminated, and what was dramatic in that original concept would have to be enhanced and brought front and center. At the same time, I would have to do what has to be done with works meant to be performed. I would have to recast the story as a story told by convincing characters through dialogue.

At this writing, the sequel as play is developing nicely, and I hope to find a theatre that will work with me to put it on the stage. That will not be easy. But I will keep at it. At the same time, I would like to publish it in book form for those who got interested in Murdoch in the first book about him and wonder what happened to him and don’t want to wait until the sequel about him gets produced in his or her area. Murdoch has had a lot of exciting adventures since the end of “Murdoch McLoon And His Windmill Boat,” and the reader will find it interesting, even gripping, to find out what became of him.

Thank you for tuning into Mind Check. For a look at my other writing, see the website http://www.sasaftwrites.com. Please note that my two latest books, Murdoch McLoon And His Windmill Boat and City Above The Sea And Other Poems are now available online. Links to the publisher Xlibris can be found on the sasaft website. You can call the publisher directly at 888-795-4274 ext. 7876 or use the publisher’s website Xlibris.com.

Copyright © 2009 by Stephen Alan Saft

YIDDISH, A SECRET REVEALED; YES, I UNDERSTAND YIDDISH!

Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about Yiddish, a language I grew up not understanding or, more accurately, a language I grew up understanding a little bit while pretending that I didn’t understand it at all. Growing up in the Philadelphia neighborhood of Logan and later even further out in West Oak Lane, I soon found it an advantage to pretend not to know Yiddish. It was spoken all around me by my mother, father, maternal grandmother, maternal grandfather, aunt, and others. Most often it was used as a way for the adults in my life to communicate with each other when they wanted to conceal something from me.

As the first kid in the family, I had no one I wanted to share this hidden knowledge with. Better to keep it to myself. Otherwise the secret would get out, and then no one would use Yiddish around me ever again, anyway not to conceal secrets.

Learning by Osmosis

Funny thing about language. When you hear it long enough, especially when you are very young, words, phrases and whole sentences start to sink in even when the speakers don’t want you to understand what they are saying. Hence one of the earliest Yiddish sentences that I came to understand on my own was “Du vilst nemen dilla spiladicha?” Translation: “Do you want to take him to the movies?” Hearing that sentence I could make certain that my behavior improved and that I did whatever else I thought necessary to ensure that I did in fact get taken to the movies.

A note about writing Yiddish in the Roman alphabet. I am transliterating, that is using the Roman alphabet to come as close as possible to attempt to reproduce the more Germanic pronunciation of the words as I remember them. Yiddish came into being as a dialect of German around the 10th century in an area around East Germany. It is written using the Hebrew alphabet, the letters of which run from right to left. The Jews of this region—in fact, of all of central to western Europe—are known as Ashkenazi Jews. Hence one can say that the language of Ashkenazi Jews was Yiddish. It was also the language of the Chasidic Jews, that is, Jews known for their very conservative dress, where the men dance with each other at celebrations and definitely not with women—with the exceptions of weddings when at least a handkerchief must separate them.

Lithuanian Origins

Another point I should make is that I am attempting here to reproduce the Yiddish I heard as a child among Jews where the dominant speaker was originally from Lithuania, that is, my maternal grandfather, named Solomon Bricker. Solomon Bricker was what was known as a Litvak, that is, as someone from Lithuania. The influence of my father may also be present. Though born in the United States, his linguistics origins were Austria and Hungary. There is a long history of teasing between Jews from Lithuania or Litvaks and Jews from other places, and my father. Louis Saft, was not shy in poking fun at the Litvaks around him, in other words his in-laws.

What else do I remember of the Yiddish I heard growing up? My grandfather, Solomon Bricker, was often in the middle of disputes between his two daughters, Helen, my mother, and her sister, Jeanette, the younger of the two. “Don’t drey mine cup,” he was often heard to say using a mixture of Yiddish and English. I took the meaning of this sentence to be: “Stop beating my head [with your arguing or bickering.]”

What Else”?
Gay slofen remains with me as well. This is a command from adults to children, “Go to sleep” is the meaning. Another “gay” sentence I often heard was “Gay gezunta heit” or “go in good health.” Other words and phrases remain as well. Essen is the command from the German “eat.” Shana madel is a pretty girl. Balabusta was a word I heard from the women of the family which always struck me as funny and which I took to be a somewhat derisive epithet for someone who overdid in her cooking or house preparation.

Oy gevalt and oy vay are well known Yiddish expressions that also have stayed with me. Both mean the equivalent of “how awful.” In fact, these two are both so common that they have long been on the verge of being accepted into everyday usage in English. A Yiddish word that in fact is even closer to being accepted is schlepp, which means to carry when that which is carried is heavy and uncomfortable. A New Yorker might say, “I schlepped those two packages all the way from Macy’s on 34th Street to East 72nd Street. I’m exhausted.”

Words for Body Parts

Then there are the Yiddish words for the parts of the body, the most famous of which is tochis and its diminutive tussy, used with children. “Backside” is the part of the body that these words refer to. I usually take both words in a humorous way. However, it is possible to use a word like tochis in a more serious, obscene and even harsh way. For more on words of this type and for more on Yiddish in general, see the books of Leo Rosten, specifically The Joys of Yiddish and The Joys of Yinglish.

What about chutzpah, the word for nerve, daring, gall or risk taking in Yiddish? Like schlep, chutzpah is now so widely used that it is about ready to become part of standard English—or already is. I have heard Protestant ministers use the word without showing any need to translate. Why didn’t I mentioned this heavily used word sooner? Strange to admit, chutzpah was not part of my childhood vocabulary. In fact, I don’t think I ever heard the word until some time after I started working in New York City in 1964.

Do I read any Yiddish publications today? No, but perhaps it can be said that I come close. Among the many publications that I read on a regular basis is The Forward, that is, its English language version. The Forward got started on the Lower East Side of Manhattan in the latter part of the 19th Century and initially was published entirely in Yiddish. One of the claims to fame of the all Yiddish Forward is that it introduced the writing of Isaac Basheyev Singer to the world. Singer was to win the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1978.

Thank you for tuning into Mind Check. For a look at my other writing, see the website http://www.sasaftwrites.com. Please note that my two latest books, Murdoch McLoon And His Windmill Boat and City Above The Sea And Other Poems are now available online. Links to the publisher Xlibris can be found on the sasaft website. You can call the publisher directly at 888-795-4274 ext. 7876 or use the publisher’s website Xlibris.com.

Copyright © 2009 by Stephen Alan Saft

REFORMING HEALTH CARE AND THE BERNARD MADOFF SITUATIONS--MY THOUGHTS ON BOTH

The Barack Obama Administration has now turned its attention to health care. This is another trillion dollar burden on the U.S. taxpayer, and given all our other burdens—“zombie bank” bailouts, subprime foreclosure crises, U.S. auto industry bankruptcies—it boggles my mind how the Administration is going to deal with this one.

But it must!!! I agree that the time is now to attempt to deal with this immense problem. There won’t be another opportunity in my lifetime, maybe not in the lifetime of our children and grandchildren to fix this mess, and meanwhile health care will become more and more of a drag on the nation’s economy. All the crises facing the Obama Administration are complicated and don’t lend themselves to easy solutions, but this one is the most complicated thus far. Why?

Financing Not On Firm Footing

One reason is the nonproductive way in which health care is paid for in this country. The system assumes a fully employed population with employers footing the bill. Right now, however, we have unemployment approaching 9% in some areas. Who pays for the 9% out of work? And why should employers have to shoulder the responsibility in the first place? Employers need to be investing in expanding existing businesses to increase employment opportunities, They should be investing in research and new product development. They should be investing in improving existing products and keeping prices competitive. They should not be burdened with having to foot the bill for the nation’s health care system.

And what about the cost of health care in the United States? It changes hourly. Everyone wants to reap the benefits of the nation’s health care research and development efforts, which is a huge complicated endeavor. Nothing is to be accomplished by pointing some finger of blame at the nation’s pharmaceutical industry. The pharmaceutical industry is doing what we want them to do. We want them to save our lives, and that’s what they are attempting to do. Oh yes, they're also making a lot of money in the process.

We have an extremely health care greedy population. No one wants to die. Everyone wants to postpone the inevitable for as a long as possible. Everyone wants to live forever, and we expect to enjoy the benefits of our thriving medical research and development activities forever.

In the laboratory a researcher comes up with a yet another technique that appears promising for curing cancer. Let’s take the case of the technique for growing human cancer attack spores on tobacco plants for attacking cancer, which I have written about previously.

Researchers Need Compensation

The pharmaceutical firms are willing to allow a few researchers to conduct such speculative research, but they expect to be compensated for staff time and benefits. This is a fairly new effort, not long on the books. The research shows promise , and so now it is time to test the technique in the field. The services of several more staff are required. We are leaving out issues like the compensation of patients who allow themselves to be used as guinea pigs.

Now lets add several degrees of further complication by looking at all the specialties in all of medicine. All the researchers working at all the pharmaceutical and medical research facilities in all these fields want what they consider fair access to the research and development dollars available.

Enormous Management Challenge

How do you manage such a huge field with so many competing interests and one that is in a constant state of flux? Part of the challenge is the mere fact that the field since it is requiring taxpayers dollars in the first place needs managing at all. Then there are so many stake holders, not just all the U.S. users of health care. Major stake holders like all the physicians and all the nurses and all those in the medical technical specialties. And how about the medical equipment engineers and all the designers and builders of all the equipment like scanners, etc., and all the medical insurance interests?

What an enormous undertaking!

Infuriating Case of Bernard Madoff

Another topic that has my attention is the infurating story of Bernard Madoff, who bilked many people out of sizable amounts of money using the notorious Ponzi scheme. In a Ponzi investment scheme people are lured into placing their money with the expectation that their initial investments will be turned into much more money, the result of the brilliant investment strategies on the part of the operator of the investment enterprise.

In fact, the operator’s so called “brilliant investment strategies” are the result of taking new contributor’s money and turning it back to veteran contributors in the form of so-called dividends. In other words, a Ponzi scheme has no real assets. Only the continued gullibility of new investors keeps it going. When the lack of true assets is revealed, the whole scheme falls apart like a collapsing house of cards, and everyone who placed money with the scheme operator is a loser.

What Makes Him Tick?

I don’t know Bernie Madoff at all, but I can’t help wondering about the man. What makes Bernie Madoff tick? Is he merely a greedy and heartless schemer? At least one person who lost a fortune to Madoff is reported to have committed suicide. If you are Madoff, how do you live with that fact?

I want to believe that he started out with the best of intentions, but perhaps I am cutting him too much slack. Rotten to the core—that may be the Bernard Madoff that we have seen in the media. Still I want to believe otherwise. He starts out with the best of intentions, but then the pressure to appear successful takes over. Bernier Madoff was smarter than everyone else. Right? Bernie Madoff didn’t disappoint other people, especially not if they enjoyed positions of power and leadership in their respective fields. Right? Not if they are someone like Steven Spielberg, famed Hollywood moviemaker. How can you submit a monthly investment report to the likes of Steven Spielberg and not show a continued record of success?

Reputation to Uphold, Right?

Imagine the self-imposed pressures on this man to continue to show a record of brilliance as a manager of other people’s money? He had a reputation to uphold, right?

Such is the mess we get ourselves intro when at core we are not honest with ourselves or with others—when we have no mechanism for dealing honestly with ourselves and others, when honesty is no part of our personal ethos. We are a crook through and through. We squander other people’s fortunes. People, once friends, commit suicide because of us.

I have written about this before, especially in my poetry. At heart relations between all of us are based on intangible virtues like trust. No amount of government-imposed regulation frees us from that reality. We can all take advantage of misplaced confidence if we have an inclination to lie, to cheat, to not tell the truth. Trust is the indispensable virtue. Trust is everything.

Thank you for tuning into Mind Check. For a look at my other writing, see the website http://www.sasaftwrites.com. Please note that my two latest books, Murdoch McLoon And His Windmill Boat and City Above The Sea And Other Poems are now available online. Links to the publisher Xlibris can be found on the sasaft website.

Copyright © 2009 by Stephen Alan Saft

JUST BEING WITH MY WIFE IS GOOD ENOUGH FOR ME--REFLECTIONS ON MY FEELINGS TOWARD HARRIET ON VALENTINE'S DAY

Harriet and I recently celebrated our 28th Valentine’s Day together. We’ve never done a whole lot to celebrate this tribute to romantic love, but we’ve always done something. We’ve been married 28 years so as the reader can tell we hadn’t known each other very long when we decided to tie the knot in October 1980. In fact, we had met in March of 1980 on St. Patrick’s Day, a whole month after Valentine’s Day of 1980. By the time we celebrated our first Valentine’s Day together in February 1981, we’d already known each 11 months and been married four months.

By the way, our experience of marrying just seven months after we’d first met is just one more example among many that short engagements often do lead to very successful marriages.

Card From Walmart

The card I got Harriet this year came from Walmart. I didn’t spend very much time picking it out. Maybe the most shocking aspect of this confession is not that I didn’t spend very much time picking out the card, but that I, a practicing poet, used a store bought card in the first place. Yes, I do confess that I use store bought cards—and I enjoy doing it. I’ve written original poems to my wife before, and I am sure I will write more, but to this point the inspiration to write something for her has not come at the time of those annual milestones in her life—birthdays, anniversaries, and Valentine’s Day.

On the other, I do enjoy the experience of going to a store, mingling with the crowd, and picking out a card. In some past postings to Mind Check, I’ve confessed to the fact that I am an introvert—one of those people who normally gets a shot of energy from being alone rather than from being with others. Being with others is sometimes exhausting for me—all that talk, talk, talk. There are exceptions, and one of them involves mingling with crowds where we all have a common purpose, for example, sharing the excitement of being involved together in making purchases for a shared event like Valentine’s Day. Exciting!

Weekly Supermarket Shopping

I can remember when I first came to the Washington, DC, area in 1978. I had left my first marriage, and I was trying to reestablish myself in this new area where I knew almost no one. Yes, I was lonely. One of the things I would look forward to during this transitional time in my life was the weekly shopping trip, almost always on Saturdays, to the nearest supermarket. I didn’t have to talk to anyone. Just being with the other people in the busy supermarket where I could share in the energy that came from busy people with the common purpose of weekly food shopping was good enough.

Let me get back to the Valentine’s Day card that I got Harriet this time around. As I said, I didn’t give it that much thought when I picked it out, but I now think that I ended up with the best Valentine’s Day card I’ve ever gotten her. The main reason that it is the best is that the message so perfectly captures what I believe.

Back from Big Island

As I’ve previously indicated, Harriet and I are just back from the Big Island of Hawaii where we had a wonderful time. One of the great things about this vacation was that we were able to work on reconnecting family relationships that had gotten a little frayed after four years of separation. In case, I didn’t mention it before, we have family on the Big Island of Hawaii—son Scott, daughter-in-law Yumiko and grandson Sebastian, known as Sebi. We don’t get to see them nearly enough. Inevitably some bad feelings may get introduced into a relationship when family members don’t see each other for a prolonged period of time, and we wanted to make sure through this trip that negatives like these got smoothed over.

Hence the purpose of the trip was not to do anything for Harriet and my relationship, which was already as good as it could be, in my opinion. That was one of the ideas that I was trying to express with the card. Here is the message on the card, a Hallmark card in the “connections by Hallmark” series.

If someone were to ask me
What a perfect day would be,
I wouldn’t think of places
that have lovely sights to see,
I wouldn’t wish for sunny skies
or special things to do,
For I’d just want to have a day
That I could spend with you…
And if someone were to ask me
What would make a perfect life,
I’d simply say “I have that,”
for I have you for my wife.

To put the matter another way: I don’t need to make a trip to Hawaii or any other beautiful place to give meaning to my life. Just being with my wife is good enough for me.

Thank you, Hallmark and thanks for tuning into Mind Check. For a look at my other writing, see the website http://www.sasaftwrites.com. Please note that my two latest books, Murdoch McLoon And His Windmill Boat and City Above The Sea And Other Poems are now available online. Links to the publisher Xlibris can be found on the sasaft website.

Copyright © 2009 by Stephen Alan Saft

BACK FROM HAWAII, THOUGHTS ON THE IMPORTANCE OF LOVE AND FAMILY

We are just back from the Big Island of Hawaii where we got a chance to perform the infrequent role of hands-on grandparents to the fourteen-year-old Sebastian. Sebi, as he is called, is a very fine student and a very fine basketball player, and we do not get to see him nearly enough. In fact, since his birth we have only had a chance to spend time with him about six times including a memorable time with him in Saporo, Japan, when his father was teaching at a Japanese university, all told less than 40 days.

The fact is that in the 14 years since Sebi’s birth we have only spent a total of about 40 days with the entire family, son Scott, daughter-in-law Yumiko, and Sebi. Why that has been the case I will leave to subsequent explorations. What this trip has served to demonstrate to me is how important family contact is. We humans are not solitary creatures. We are not meant to be alone even if we have a tendency to introversion, as I do. An introvert I may be, but a hermit I am not.

Highest Form of Feeling

Being with other people is essential, but no other contact is more important than being with family. Love, not romantic love, but what we refer to as agape or divine love, is the highest form of interpersonal feeling we can imagine. Under ideal conditions, that is, when our spiritual practices are manifest in us at the highest level it is what we feel toward everyone. Until we can attain the ideal, however, it is the feeling that comes most naturally to us when we are with family.

Let me express this principle in another, equally crucial way. How can I experience love for others but not experience love for my family? It is true that our family members have the capacity to hurt us more easily and more deeply than others can because of the bonds we feel through the sense of shared inheritance and shared experience. We aren’t expecting hurtful behavior from other family members, and when it happens it can hit us very hard and leave scars that last a lifetime.

Power Translates To Responsibility

It is for these reasons that, I believe, that family members need to work as hard as they can to treat each other with compassion and forgiveness. Because each of us has the power to hurt another family member more easily than anyone else, that is the very reason that each of us has the responsibility to be especially gentle, especially understanding, and especially loving in family situations.

In summary, it was wonderful being with family for the last nine days. I found it very renewing—and the gorgeous Big Island of Hawaii wasn’t bad either.

Thanks for tuning into Mind Check. For a look at my other writing, see the website http://www.sasaftwrites.com. Please note that my two latest books, Murdoch McLoon And His Windmill Boat and City Above The Sea And Other Poems are now available online. Links to the publisher Xlibris can be found on the sasaft website.

Copyright © 2009 by Stephen Alan Saft

KEN WILBER BOOK IS INSPIRATION FOR MY OWN THOUGHTS ABOUT DEATH

A friend lent me her copy of Grace And Grit, Spirituality And Healing In The Life And Death of Treya Killam Wilber by Ken Wilber, and reading the book has been a very moving experience for me. I strongly recommend this book to anyone who is wrestling with the question of death and dying and especially anyone wrestling with the question of death and dying from cancer.

That said, please be advised that Grace and Grit is not easy reading at all as it deals in considerable detail with the five year struggle of Treya Killam Wilber, wife of the author, with the complications from a diagnosis of breast cancer, very possibly all the complications that are possible from this disease. To put it simply Treya went through hell before her death, and Ken was right there with her, the perfect caregiver, anyway damn close to it.

Diagnosis Within Weeks of Marriage

Treya, born Terry Killam, had the misfortune to be diagnosed with breast cancer within weeks of marrying Ken Wilber, noted philosopher and writer. Wilber writes extensively on the interconnections of the spiritual and physical worlds. Treya and Ken then spent the next five years dealing with Treya’s disease. Demonstrating immense courage, Treya tried a combination of conventional and unconventional medical approaches and spiritual practices, particularly of the Eastern variety. Her attempts to save herself included a prolonged round of treatments in Bonn, Germany. Eventually, however, the tumors infesting her body including her brain proved too much to overcome, and she died at home with her husband and other family members and friends by her side.

In putting the book together, Ken incorporated a number of passages from Treya’s journals and letters. Hence the book is a record of two points of view—of Treya, the victim, and of Ken, the principal caregiver. In this case, the approach serves to underscore just how close this husband and wife were during the entire ordeal, the one exception being a dark period at about the two-year anniversary when the two drew apart and became hostile toward each other. Ken even contemplated suicide during this highly stressful low point in their relationship.

Facing Up To My Own Mortality

For me, the book proved especially useful in helping me hone my view of the difficult subject of death. I have had to face up to my own mortality at different periods in my life—first when I was diagnosed with thyroid cancer at the age of 27 in 1966. None of us like to think of our own mortality. We prefer to think of ourselves as never dying, of living forever. Death is all around us, but we are adept at ignoring it. We prefer to think that it will never happen to us. We’re going to go on indefinitely forever, right?

Now having gone through my second bone marrow transplant about six months ago, the subject has presented itself once again. No, I’m not going to live forever. Yes, I’m going to die. Being able to accept the inevitability of death has a certain liberating effect. Since it’s going to happen to me someday, there’s no sense dwelling on it. No sense worrying about it. And it’s not just going to happen to me. I am not being singled out. It‘s going to happen to everyone.

Rules of the Game of Life

These are the rules of the game called life. The fact of death is a common bond that all human beings share. You can feel remorse about it, and as a lover of life I do, but it makes no sense feeling hurt or spiteful or angry, even though all of us do experience these emotions at some point.

I confess that at times when the reality seems more than a little overwhelming, I take some solace from a game that I play on occasion. It’s a game I play entirely in my own mind so you are not likely to know I am playing it. Sometimes I bring the game into play at a public event or in a social situation, let’s say at a not entirely enjoyable party. The game involves looking at each of the people around me and thinking, “It’s not just my fate, but you’re not going to escape nor are you or you or you or you, etc. None of us are because we’re all mortal.”

Basis for World’s Religions

At this point I could attempt to come forward with some profound statements about how the fact of death is the basis for all of the world’s religions. The common bond of our mortality including the common fear of death has led almost all of us to seek solace and hope in the answers provided by established religion. In my case, long a believer in the power of reason including the scientific method I have of late seen more clearly the limitations of these approaches and conversely have found more answers in spiritual explorations.

I find it ironic that as an undergraduate taking a required History of Religions course I found Hinduism the most difficult of the major religions to understand and appreciate. Now I find this ancient religion the easiest to understand and appreciate—specifically the concept that God is in all of us. The divine lives in all of us, ready to be discovered when we have the inclination. The greatest manifestation of this reality is love.

Thanks for tuning into Mind Check. For a look at my other writing, see the website http://www.sasaftwrites.com. Please note that my two latest books, Murdoch McLoon And His Windmill Boat and City Above The Sea And Other Poems are now available online. They’re both available from the sasaft website and also from the xlibris.com website. And now it’s off to the Big Island of Hawaii with wife Harriet and godson Stephen to see my son Scott, daughter-in-law Yumiko and grandson Sebi. Perhaps I’ll have more to say about this trip in my next posting.

Copyright © 2009 by Stephen Alan Saft

MOMENTOUS YEAR REACHES ITS HIGH POINT WITH GODCHILD REUNION

This is an appropriate time to be reviewing the events of 2008. The start of a new year is just a week away, and it is normal at a time like this to be looking back and asking, “What kind of year was it anyway?”

One word sums it up for me. “Momentous.” The election of the first African American as President in our history made sure of that. As long as anyone will care about American history, the year 2008 will have its special consideration—as the year Barack Obama got elected. It was also a year that the high flying U.S. economy started unraveling, but let us hope that that end-of-year phenomenon will be short lived under the management of a new Obama Administration.

Second Bone Marrow Transplant

For me, 2008 was a year of special significance for several other reasons. It was a year during which I underwent the second bone marrow transplant of my life. The bone marrow transplant, which I had first gone through in 2002, was again urged on me to fight the reoccurrence of the blood cancer called lymphoma. It was also a year during which I managed to publish two books of poetry (see my website for more details: http://www.sasaftwrites.com), and it was the year that I was reunited with Stephen Johnson, my godson. In fact, the latter proved to be the most dramatic event of all for me.

I was lying in my bed in the bone marrow transplant ward on the ninth floor of the Reynolds Tower of Baptist Hospital, Winston-Salem, North Carolina sometime in mid July when the phone on the stand next to my bed rang. I picked it up, and the caller on the other end introduced himself as someone I had not spoken with in many years. He said his name was Stephen Johnson. He said he was my godson.

Hearing Name Is Enough

As soon as I heard his name, even before the word “godson” registered, I knew who he was. The emotion surged in me. Indeed we hadn’t spoken in many years—over 20 in fact. When we were last in touch Stephen wasn’t quite a teenager, probably 12 years old. And yes indeed he was my godson, my godson who I had abandoned for reasons, however misguided, around 1987.

His mother, a single black woman who had worked for my first wife and me as a cleaning lady in Brooklyn by name of Martha Jean Johnson, had asked me to serve as Stephen’s godfather just before he was born in 1968. He was a baby boy coming into the world in Harlem Hospital without a father, and it seemed to me that the least I could do was say “yes” to Martha Jean’s request. My assumption was that a godfather was expected to serve as a role model, and this was a responsibility that I felt flattered to be asked to fulfill. How could I refuse?

Share Room With Stephen

Even after I moved away from New York City, first to New Jersey, then to Maine, and then to the Washington, D.C., area I had kept in touch with Martha Jean and Stephen—at the very least sending them presents at holiday time. At some point when my first marriage was falling apart I fled Maine for New York City and spent at least one night with Martha Jean and Stephen in their Lower East Side apartment where Stephen let me share his room with him.

Just before wife Harriet and I were married in 1980, the second marriage for both of us, we met in New York where she was taking computer training. By then I had relocated to Washington, and both Harriet and I were working for a Washington, D.C. corporation in the satellite communications business. During that visit, we got together with Stephen and Martha Jean in Brooklyn Heights, and as best I can remember the four of us walked around this old Brooklyn neighborhood together, a neighborhood famous for its Promenade overlooking the Lower West side of Manhattan and New York Harbor. Brooklyn Heights had been the first place in the city where I had lived just after leaving graduate school at Yale in 1963.

Go To The Boat Show

Even earlier Stephen remembers my taking him to the New York Boat Show at what was then called the New York Coliseum up on Columbus Circle when I was still living in Maine and working for a publication called National Fisherman based in the Penobscot Bay town of Camden. National Fisherman would have an exhibit booth at the New York Boat Show every year as a base from which to sell advertising space in the publication and to drum up subscription sales, and those of us on the editorial side of the operation would also have our chance to be present at the show and to take advantage of what the big city had to offer.

The break with Stephen and his mother occurred in the mid 1980s, and it was entirely my fault. I fell on hard times, first losing my job with the satellite communications company, then a little more than a year later losing a new job as director of communications for an association in Silver Spring, Maryland. I had been sending Stephen and Martha Jean presents at Christmas time, as I indicated, but with the loss of the second job I felt devastated. By this time I had taken on the responsibility of trying to put my son through an expensive eastern college, and I had no idea how I was going to be able to manage it now with the loss of the second job.

Low Opinion of Myself

Not only did I stop the presents to Stephen and Martha Jean, but the communication as well—an act of extremism that didn’t have to be. I felt embarrassed that I was in such dire straights financially, and I’m afraid I overreacted. In my mind at the time, presents and caring about another human being were one in the same thing. It didn’t occur to me that Stephen needed the continuing attention of an adult male far more than he needed some extra dollars at Christmas time. Yes, I was suffering from a very low opinion of myself at the time. The loss of jobs will do that to you.

Now we jump ahead to July 2008. It struck me as a miracle that Stephen had gotten in touch with me. It struck me that I was being given a second chance to make amends to this man, now in his early 40s, to make up for my failures as a role model the first time around. I didn’t want to mess it up. I wanted to be the godfather now that I felt I had not been before.

Hyatt Hotel Jersey City

In the course of that fateful telephone conversation from my bed in Baptist Hospital, I learned that Martha Jean had died at least five years before. Stephen was married now, he told me. In fact, he had an 18-year-old daughter, but amazingly he was still living in the same Lower East Side apartment where I had once stayed and shared a room with him. Yes, I was older now with a much stronger idea of the responsibility that we bear each other. I wasn’t going to be so cavalier about my relationship with Stephen Johnson ever again.

Since then we’ve been together twice, first in Greensboro, North Carolina, where we met after one of my follow-up sessions at Baptist Hospital, then in New York during Thanksgiving when Harriet and I stayed at the Hyatt Hotel Jersey City and were treated to the breathtaking views of Lower West Side Manhattan, the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island and where Stephen played the role of chauffeur and drove us all around the city. During the first visit we met Stephen’s adopted sister Melissa, and during the second Marsha, his wife, Camille, his daughter, and Cita, Marsha’s mother from Trinidad as well as Melissa, all wonderful people who we thoroughly enjoyed being with. And now we are just about to go to the Big Island of Hawaii with Stephen where we will be getting together with son Scott, his wife Yumiko and our grandson Sebi (Sebastian).

38 Year Reunion

As best I can figure—and I took the photographs that are a record of the event—Scott and Stephen were last together in 1970 when Scott was four and Stephen was two. Now they’ll be getting together again 38 years later.

Thanks entirely to Stephen’s courage and initiative, I’ve been given this second chance to make a whole new relationship with him, and I’m not going to squander the opportunity this time. This time I’m going to be the godfather that fate has meant me to be.

Thanks for tuning into Mind Check. For a look at my other writing, see the website http://www.sasaftwrites.com. Please note that my two latest books, Murdoch McLoon And His Windmill Boat and City Above The Sea And Other Poems are now available online. They would make wonderful holiday presents for people you care about. They’re both available from the sasaft website. Have a healthy and happy 2009.

Copyright © 2008 by Stephen Alan Saft

WE MUST HELP THE U.S.AUTO INDUSTRY, BUT WE MUST INSIST ON FAIR TERMS FOR THE U.S. TAX PAYER

The fiscal crisis spreading like influenza throughout the world has for the moment infected the U.S. auto industry. Should the U.S. Congress use tax payer funds to bail out the U.S. auto industry just as it is currently bailing out the U.S. financial industry and attempting to bail out the U.S. housing industry?

Like each of the bail-out plans that has come before Congress, the U.S. auto industry bail-out score has been accompanied by a howling chorus of nay sayers singing an angry counterpoint. The negative lyrics of this chorus include such lines as “let them fail. We don’t care if they go out of business. All they know how to build is over sized gas guzzlers that pollute the environment.”

UAW Blamed

Still another set of lines pertains to the United Auto Workers (UAW) Union and unions in general. These lines say something like this: “It’s the UAW with a long history of sweetheart contracts with management, the result of the repeated capitulations of management over the years, that has brought the U.S. auto industry to the low state it finds itself. Now is the time to get rid of the UAW and maybe the industry itself will revive. And while we’re at it let’s get rid of all labor unions.”

What is to be done? The higher pay and benefits won by the UAW for its worker members over the decades of union contract negotiations has helped to make these workers and their families even more valuable contributors to society as tax payers, as consumers of products and services in their respective communities, and as involved citizens active in community affairs than would have been possible had they been members of an oppressed working class as they once were during Henry Ford’s time.

Good Pay Hurts Competitiveness

On the other hand, the case can be made that these same workers with their middle class pay and benefit packages have contributed to the declining competitiveness of the industry of which they are part as that industry attempts to compete with the products of foreign manufacturers with a work force often earning much less and receiving much less in benefits. They’ve accomplished that simply by doing what all of us humans do by instinct, that is, to seek to improve our situations in life.

Nor can we remove from blame the senior executives of these organizations with their obscene pay and benefit packages and the corporate jets at their disposal costing $35 million or more. They too have played a role in keeping the U.S. auto industry less competitive than it should have been.

Horrendous Ripple Effect

Do we let this industry employing hundreds of thousands of people throughout the country just go out of business? The ripple effect would be horrendous with not just assembly line workers but all the people who make the tires, the glass, the batteries, the electronics, and other parts as well as all the people employed at the dealerships out of work as well. No, we simply can’t let that happen. The unemployment figures are already alarming enough. Imagine those figures two to three times as high.

Do We Attach Strings?

And so I ask the question again. What is to be done? Now is a good time for a reexamination of the economic and political principles that lie at the heart of our most sacred assumptions. Do we attach strings to the bail-out funds for the industry? Do we say to both senior management and union rank and file, “We’ll give you several billion of taxpayer money. Now you agree to substantial pay cuts and benefit cuts until this industry can turn out affordable products that will compete with the products of the Japanese and the Koreans—products that have less of a negative impact on the environment ”

The answer in my opinion is a resounding “yes.” These same strings need to be applied, in my opinion, to all organizations receiving taxpayer hand outs. Communism is dead and good riddance to it. Even socialism has significantly less standing now than it did during the middle of the last century. We don’t need to be guided by these left wing philosophies, but what we do need is to uphold a middle ground philosophy that accounts for individual rights, but which still encompasses the interests of all of us as a group with common needs and interests as citizens or taxpayers—a community of common interests.

Survival With Healthy Economy

Our common need and interest is the survival of this country, survival with as healthy an economy as possible. This, I believe, is part of the concept of “happiness” as stated by Thomas Jefferson in the Declaration of Independence—our “unalienable rights” including “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”

A political philosophy that comes closest to expressing this concept of a middle ground philosophy that respects both individual rights and the common needs of the members of society is called Communitarianism. One of its spokesmen is the philosopher Amitai Etzioni, who for many years was associated with George Washington University in Washington, D.C., my former employer. Etzioni has done a lot of critical thinking about supposed conflict concepts such as the rights of pedophiles versus the rights of society to be protected against pedophiles.

Etzioni’s Golden Rule

Etzioni proposes a new Golden Rule, which goes like this: “Respect and uphold society’s moral order as you would have society respect and uphold your autonomy.”

Okay, so what do we need to expect from the auto industry—both labor and management—in turn for the bail-out? Here are the terms I would impose:

• Cars and other vehicles must be built to the highest safety standards

• Cars and other vehicles must be built to last as long as possible. No more planned obsolescence.

• Warranties must be fully guaranteed and protected by federal law and fully transferable from owner to owner, that is, if the vehicles are fuel efficient

• There must be across the board commitment to hybrid technology including hybrid and electric car combinations. No new vehicles getting less than 20 miles per gallon. Outlaw them.

• A federal board—the Fair Executive Compensation Board--established by Congress to review and approve (or veto) all executive compensation above $250,000 per year, criterion number one for this board, the effect on car prices and competitiveness

• A federal board—the Fair Labor Contracts Board—established by Congress to review and approve (or veto) all labor contracts, criterion number one for this board, the effect on car prices and competitiveness.

Thanks for tuning into Mind Check. For a look at my other writing, see the website http://www.sasaftwrites.com. Please note that my latest book, Murdoch McLoon And His Windmill Boat, is now available. It would make a wonderful holiday present for someone you care about. It can be ordered on line. I am also happy to announce that still another new book by Stephen Alan Saft, City Above The Sea And Other Poems, is nearing completion. In fact, you can also order it on line right now. You’ll learn more about both books at the sasaftwrites website.

Copyright © 2008 by Stephen Alan Saft

A NEW CAR OR HOW THE SELF THAT LOVES THE NEW TRUMPED SECURITY OBSESSED SELVES

Why did I buy a new car at a time like this? The economy is in the doldrums, and optimism about anything having to do with spending money for anything is extremely hard to find. Yet a couple of days ago I went to a car dealer in Blacksburg, Virginia, home of Virginia Tech, and traded in my 2003 Subaru Outback for a 2009 Ford Hybrid Escape equipped with four-wheel drive.

I’m extremely adept at questioning yesterday’s decisions, especially when it comes to decisions about spending a lot of money. I do this all the time. I’ll get very excited about some new acquisition. I’ll give passing attention to questions about whether it's affordable or not. I’ll quickly convince myself that I can handle the expenses, and then I’m back to musing on how much I want to have whatever it is. I’ll make the purchase, and within hours the second guessing sets in. Why did I spend all that money? How will I ever afford it?

Delayed Soul Searching

Why didn’t I go through such soul searching before the purchase was made? Why the intense questioning now when the purchase is a done deal?

An article in the latest issue of The Atlantic, one of many periodicals that I read, helps to explain the phenomenon and makes me feel that I am not such an odd ball after all. The article is entitled “First Person Plural,” by Paul Bloom (The Atlantic, November 2008, pages 90-98). Paul Bloom teaches psychology at Yale University.

Community of Competing Selves

What the article suggests is that in each of us is more than one self and that some of these selves often may be in conflict with one another. Certainly they can be driven by different motives. Says psychologist Bloom, “Many researchers now believe, to varying degrees, that each of us is a community of competing selves, with the happiness of one often causing the misery of another.” Later, he explains, “The idea is that…within each brain different selves are continually popping in and out of existence. They have different desires, and they fight for control—bargaining with, deceiving, and plotting against one another.”

In my case, one self gets easily excited about the new—new technology, new ways of doing things. This self can hardly contain itself when what is new seems to have a practical benefit and at the same time appears to be the socially responsible thing to do. I started getting excited about the idea of owning a hybrid during the spring of 2008 when gasoline prices began their steep rise. I became obsessed with the fuel gage on the Subaru. I’d watch it drop before my eyes as the vehicle traveled the windy mountain roads we have in this area, and I’d be struck with some dread as the thought crossed my mind, “Oh no, I’ve got to buy fuel again.” Then I’d feel more pain at the gas pump as the total on the fuel pump gage went beyond $50.

Negatives With The Subaru

I was also motivated, I have to admit, by the increasing sluggishness of the Subaru when climbing the kind of hills we have here in the mountains of Southwest Virginia, and my motivation increased even more when I returned from Baptist Hospital this summer, where I had my second bone marrow transplant, with knees that weren’t working very well and heightened sensitivity in the legs to any feeling of being cramped. I should mention that I now measure six feet three inches tall, and a good bit of that height is in my legs. (When I was younger I was over six feet five inches in height.)

Then too I need to mention that the odometer on the Subaru was getting closer and closer to the 100,000 mile mark, and under any circumstances it makes sense that I might feel that I was at some kind of decision point about the car.

Self Obsessed With Security

Hence the self that was easily excited about the new could assemble lots of supporting evidence to justify the idea of a trade-in. Another self, however, is obsessed with issues having to do with security. Overwhelmed by the self that is the lover of the new, this self kept pretty quiet until the deal was made. Only then did it adopt a loud and relentlessly negative refrain. “How can a person like you, retired and living on a fixed income, afford the significantly higher monthly payments for the new vehicle? Was this a smart thing to do?” it asked with a decidedly skeptical—even snide—tone to the imagined voice.

Then too there are other negative issues, but determining who the self is in these cases may not be so easy to figure out.

Given Your Health, Why?

“Given your health situation what are you doing buying a new car?” asks one such negative self. “You may not have very much time to enjoy it.” Then there is the issue of the down payment. Says still another negative voice: “You took a big bite out of your cash reserves to try and keep your monthly payments in line. Up to this point, you were using your cash reserves to fund your publishing ventures. You may never be able to put up the money to work with a print-on-demand (POD) publisher again after this expenditure.”

Obviously, this negative self isn’t thinking about the issue raised by the self who questioned my health and limited longevity. If I don’t have too much longer to live, what difference does it make if I won’t be able to afford to work with a print-on-demand publisher again? Another response to the negative self questioning my decision has been resounding in my mind of late: “Isn’t it time you found a publisher who doesn’t require any of your own money? Haven’t you earned the right to a publisher who will risk his or her own funds to publish your work?” Yes! Yes! Yes!

Preoccupied With New Car

Either each of the negative selves must be answered if I am ever going to have another moment of peace and get a chance to enjoy the new car or with the passage of time these negative selves must run out of energy. In fact, both parts of this proposition are coming to fruition. One way they are coming to fruition is through the new car itself. By focusing on the demands of the car, I’m having less time to listen to the negative voices. A case in point is the built-in telephone or specifically the built-in cell phone system.

Because Harriet and I are about to take the car on a long Thanksgiving holiday trip to Pennsylvania, New Jersey and New York, I am intent on getting the built-in cell phone system called Synch working so that we can send and receive calls without having to have a cell phone squashed to an ear. The built-in system takes over the operation of your cell phone. Calls come in to the center console on the dashboard, and they go out the same way. No need to use the actual cell phone itself at all.

Incoming Calls Okay, Not Out

To date, I’ve gotten half the system working properly—the part of the system that receives calls—but I’m still trying to have calls go out through the use of voice commands. That part of the system doesn’t want to work for some reason. If that problem persists, then I’ll have to make a trip back to the dealer to see the salesman who sold me the car and who seems to be an expert in the Synch system.

I’m also at an early stage of going through the main owner’s manual to learn the fine points of operating the car. The operation of a hybrid differs in some important ways from the operation of a conventional gasoline-powered car, and I am trying to learn as much as possible before daring to take the vehicle on a long trip, such as we plan in just two weeks.

By Nature An Optimist

In other words, I’m already quite involved with the new car, and this involvement is leaving me less and less time for the voices of my negative selves. By nature, I am a positive optimistic person. I suppose one can argue that the voices of optimism are still another self inside me. It looks like the positive optimistic self is starting to take over. It’s starting to quiet the negative voices. “Let the good times roll.” That’s what my positive optimistic voice is saying. “Yes, let the good times roll!”

Thanks for tuning into Mind Check. For a look at my other writing, see the website http://www.sasaftwrites.com. Please note that my latest book, Murdoch McLoon And His Windmill Boat, is now available. It would make a wonderful holiday present for someone you care about. It can be ordered on line. I am also happy to announce that still another new book by Stephen Alan Saft, City Above The Sea And Other Poems, is nearing completion. You’ll learn more about both books at the sasaftwrites website.

Copyright © 2008 by Stephen Alan Saft

QUESTIONS ANSWERED: EXPERT PRESENTS HIS ASSESSMENT OF THE CASE

Kenneth Zamkoff, M.D., is an energetic man of about fifty—about six feet tall—with a salt and pepper beard that is half way between full and a starter. He is direct, energetic and even loud. Only someone who was stone deaf would have a hard time hearing Dr. Zamkoff. He is now my oncologist, as the oncologist originally assigned to me at Baptist Hospital in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, Denise Levitan, is out on maternity leave.

I didn’t know what to make of him during our first meeting a month ago, but he made a much stronger impression during the meeting in October. Along the way, I had become aware of the fact that Dr. Zamkoff was a specialist in lymphoma and was specifically very knowledgeable about Mantle Cell B Lymphoma, my disease. When I first saw him in the examining room this time, he disappointed me with the news that he had never gotten my letter, that is the letter containing the questions that I presented in the last posting. He then heard me out as I put each question to him, and he provided the answers I was seeking.

First Question: Lymph Node

My first question had to do with the continued presence of the cancerous lymph node in my abdomen. What did this mean? The second bone marrow transplant had not eliminated the lymph node in my mesentery. Because it had not gotten rid of it, was this second bone marrow transplant a failure? “No,” Zamkoff answered, “the lymph node is smaller than it was, and it may be less active than it was or not active at all.”

So should we do something right away to find out about the activity level? “Should I have another PET Scan?” I asked. “Another PET Scan or a laparoscopic biopsy,” he answered. I wasn’t happy to hear the reference to laparoscopic surgery, which I had already tried, as reported in a Mind Check posting in the fall of 2007. The laparoscopic procedure, although short in duration, had come complete with its own memorable trauma. And so I pushed the idea of a PET Scan. Then he surprised me by turning the tables on me by confronting me with a couple of questions I was ill equipped to answer.

Already Tried Velcade

“And what is that going to tell us?” he asked. “How active it is.” I answered. “And if it is active, what are we going to do about it?” “I don’t know,” I responded. How could I answer such a question? “You’ve already tried Velcade, right?” he asked referring to the so-called wonder drug for relapsed lymphoma that had been administered late last year.

“Yes,” I responded, “and it didn’t do a thing.” “In fact, the node was larger after Velcade treatment than it was before,” he interjected while flipping through a sheaf of paper which must have been my medical records. “That’s the problem,” he responded. “We’re running out of options. I’m going to do some research and see what else we could try, but we’ve already done the obvious things.”

Go Home And Forget About It

He looked right at me. “My advice to you is that you go home and forget about it. My advice to you is that you go home and live your life.”

In other words, he was advising me not to think about the finger nail size thing inside me—the dangerous lymph node—but to get on with my life, that nothing was to be gained by worrying about it. However, just so I would not go home and become too complacent he risked contradicting himself by asserting, “ I can tell you this, it will come back.” Then to make sure I did not miss what he had said he repeated it. “Based on my experience with this disease, it will come back.”

Remission First Time

Any reason for hope then? “How much of a remission did you get from the first bone marrow transplant?” he asked. “Five years,” I responded. “Five years, okay,” he was almost shouting. “Now that is a reason for hope. Maybe you can get almost as much time out of this bone marrow transplant as the first one.”

And what about my knees? Could I or should I consider knee replacement surgery? “We can’t make that decision now,” he answered. ‘You’re not ready now. Let’s wait three months and see how you’re doing. If you’re doing okay, and you still think you want and need to do something about the knees, that will be the time to consult with an orthopedic surgeon.” Then he added for emphasis, “That will be your decision.”

That was my meeting in October with Kenneth Zamkoff, M.D., oncologist. What did I learn? Frankly, very little that I didn’t already know, but I heard it from an expert in my particular disease, and I heard it without hedging or cant. That gave me a lot to digest.

For an overview of the various writing projects I am involved with, please see the website http://www.sasaftwrites.com. My latest book Murdoch McLoon And His Windmill Boat is available from the website http://www.Xlibris.com.

Copyright © 2008 by Stephen Alan Saft

QUESTIONS FOR THE DOCTORS, AT LAST I'M POSTING TO MIND CHECK AGAIN

The best evidence of how I have been doing since my bone marrow transplant of July 2008 is how long it has taken me to post a new contribution to Mind Check. The bone marrow transplant at Baptist Hospital in Winston-Salem NC was July 8, and I have passed the three month anniversary. Look how unproductive I have been.

This bothers me. I have many writing projects pending, not just blog postings, and I hate being this inefficient. What is wrong with me? No new short poems. Minimal work on a new epic poem that I undertook to write before the bone marrow transplant. No progress on the editing of the galley proofs for the second book of poetry I committed to for this year. No activity on the projects in my archives. And no new posting for Mind Check.

Morning Motivation Then Dissipation

I have to admit that lately I’m seeing some improvements in the way I feel, particularly in the mornings, but I still don’t have the reserve of energy I was used to before I undertook the procedure. I wake in the morning, and for the first few minutes of the day I’m in the midst oif a frenzy of mental activity. I'm thinking of all the projects I could be working on, but then doubt shows its awful face. I'm wondering if I will have the motivation and the drive to plunge into these bigger challenges or if I am going to fall back on activities that are easier—like checking my email—but don’t give me the sense that I am moving my life forward?

After breakfast, the guessing game has sometimes transmuted into a confrontation with hard reality: No energy. I’m ready to climb back into bed. What happened to the energy I hoped I would have in those first few minutes after waking up? Where did it go? Did I eat the wrong combination of foods for breakfast or was it something I did the night before?

Afternoon Nap

Even if I do get something done in the morning, I can count on most afternoons being a wash out. I have lunch, and I’m ready for a nap. No need to climb into bed. Just sit me down in a chair, and I’ll soon be nodding off. I do have to acknowledge that feeling tired in the afternoon is not a phenomenon peculiar to the bone marrow transplant for me, but started happening before Harriet and I had made the move to Southwest Virginia and were still living in Arlington in Northern Virginia. Maybe it’s simply a byproduct of getting older.

At night, I usually experience a renewed spurt of energy, but it’s rare that I’m motivated to put that energy into writing anything. After a half hour of meditation using the practices of Eknath Easwaran of the Blue Mountain Center for Meditation, I’m ready to be entertained. Put me in front of the TV set and I’ll happily watch someone else’s creative work on a DVD. Lately, I have to admit, it has been hard to stay away from the TV news at night what with a national election campaign going on and with the country’s economy in virtual bankruptcy, the causes concealed by financial manipulators on Wall Street.


How Am I Walking

That’s an account of the ups and downs of my energy level during the course of a day, but what about the rest of me? What about all the other side effects that I brought home with me from the hospital? How, for example, am I walking these days? Better than when I first got home from the hospital, but outside of the house I still can’t do without a cane. I have a problem with my balance on uneven surfaces, and at night if no light illuminates the ground, I am probably going to fall whether I have a cane or not. I get disoriented if I can’t see the surface that I’m walking on. My knees are stiff, and sometimes they hurt. And they don’t seem to want to do what they are supposed to do during the walking process.

Then there’s the numbness in my fingers and my feet. In the morning when you’re getting dressed, try buttoning a shirt when your finger tips are numb. It’s not easy, and some buttons and button hole combinations are still impossible for me.

Hospital Testing Results

At this point I should reveal that about a week ago I had another series of tests at Baptist Hospital and a consultation with one of the oncologists. I came away from this session feeling disappointed. But first the good news. My blood counts for the key components of blood are in the normal range or rising and approaching normal.

Now the bad news. The CAT scan showed that the cancerous lymph node is still present. It’s smaller than it’s ever been since I first started dealing with Baptist Hospital over two years ago, and it may be the least active that it’s been. Only a PET scan would reveal activity, and I’m not sure when I’ll be allowed to have another PET scan. The point is that despite all that I’ve been through—all the chemo over a several month period including the awful BCNU or Carmustine just before the bone marrow transplant itself—the node is still with me.

The Questions

What does this mean? I’ve decided to put a series of questions to the bone marrow transplant team. I meet with them again on Oct. 20, and I would certainly appreciate having some answers by then. Here are my questions for the team:

1. What does the continued presence of the cancerous lymph node, albeit smaller in size, mean? Is this latest bone marrow transplant a failure because the node is still present? Have I wasted my time having a BMT? What?

2. How long before I may expect my lymphoma to affect any of my vital organs? Since the node is in the abdominal area, are the organs of that region the most likely candidates for attack? What would the likely treatment options be—radiation, chemotherapy, surgery?

3. Are my knees likely to improve on their own? If not, would it be advisable for me to have corrective knee surgery. I am not interested in going through another painful procedure like knee replacement if my long term prospects are not too promising. Why bother?

Let’s see how I do with these questions. I am prepared for a wide range of answers including “I don’t know.” Frankly, an honest “I don’t know” would be preferable to the kind of pronouncement we hear in most dramas about cancer victims. “ Well, Mr. Saft,” says the physician in his most earnest voice, “I’m sorry to tell you this, but you have just six months to live.”

Whatever they say, I will try to make the most of whatever time I have left. I don’t want to spend my time mired in regret and feeling sorry for myself. I still have a lot of work to do.

For an overview of my various writing projects I am involved with, please see the website http://www.sasaftwrites.com. My latest book Murdoch McLoon And His Windmill Boat is available from the website http://www.Xlibris.com.

Copyright © 2008 by Stephen Alan Saft

OBAMA NEEDS TO PUT HIS EMPHASIS ON THE STRUGGLING MIDDLE CLASS AND THE GROWTH OF POVERTY

The nomination of Barack Obama as president of the United States by the Democratic Party holds the promise of the breakthrough we need in this country to finally get over our long history of Jim Crow policies and attitudes. The problem for Barack Obama and for his running mate Joe Biden in the two months ahead before the election is that they probably can’t make too big a deal out of this fact, that is, if they want to win the election.

Yes, the nomination of Barack Obama is history making. The policies and attitudes of Jim Crow, that is, the portrayal of African Americans as inferior to whites and the corresponding practices focused on putting them down and keeping them down date back to the earliest days of slavery in this country.

Had Lincoln Not Been Assassinated

I often wonder if Abraham Lincoln had not been assassinated, that is, with the termination of the Civil War he had been alive to manage the initial phase of Reconstruction, if the outcome might have been different. I would like to think so. Instead the effects of Jim Crow including defacto Jim Crow in the North got steadily worse, that is, until the famous Brown Versus Board of Education case in 1954 that put an end to the notion of separate but equal in education. Then Martin Luther King and others who fought for equality and justice for all citizens in all phases of American life came to prominence.

African Americans have repeatedly made a name for themselves in sports and entertainment since the 1960s, and the hope is that as their visibility at the highest level of politics and other leadership positions becomes routine that racism, covert or overt, will no longer be a significant phenomenon of American life. The attitudes of the current generation of young people, that is, people under 40, point us in that direction.

Hillary Clinton: “Awfully Hard To Win”

Meanwhile it is Barack Obama and his wife Michele who are leading the way. That said, to truly make a difference Barack Obama has to get himself elected. Otherwise as a defeated nominee he’ll be a sentence or two in some future American history books and the promise will not be fulfilled. We’ll remember him as we remember Bob Dole or George Dukakis or Walter Mondale or John Kerry except with a tad more awe and a tad more regret as we think about what might have been—the first African American to have received a major party nomination, but, we’ll have to add, he couldn’t pull it off. He lost!

And let’s not forget what Hillary Clinton has been telling us throughout her run for the presidency. “It is awfully hard to win a general election,” she has said. Any notion that Obama will have an easy time achieving victory has to be put out of mind immediately.

Shift Focus To The Poor, White or Black

How does he avoid that fate? How does he go from nominee to the next president of the United States? How does he get himself elected? Peter Beinart, senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, as published in a recent issue of The Washington Post (The Washington Post National Weekly Edition, August 18-24, 2008, page 30) makes the point that if race becomes too strong an issue in the Obama-McCain campaign—and that is already threatening to happen--it will not work in Obama’s favor.

On the other hand, he says, too much has already been made of race in this campaign for Obama to pretend that it is playing no role in voters’ decisions. Rather Beinart argues that Obama “needs to control the race debate instead.”

Take On Sensitive Affirmative Action Issue

How does he do that? By switching the debate from race to class, that’s how, says Peter Beinart. By taking on the sensitive issue of affirmative action and even acknowledging that the benefits of affirmative action are no longer necessary for upper middle class and upper class blacks—at the same time, by switching the focus to the poor, and I need to add, by putting the spotlight on the struggling middle class.

This is how Beinart puts it. “Over the decades, racial preferences have played a vital role in creating a black middle class, but that middle class is now large and self-perpetuating. It is the multi-generational poor---whether urban and black or Appalachian and white—who truly need a boost today. And that’s what Obama himself seems to believe.”

Too Much Poverty

The immense challenge, however, is whether Obama and Biden can get this point across to working class or blue color white families in the key border states of Pennsylvania, Ohio, West Virginia, Kentucky, Tennessee and parts of western Virginia so that they’ll overlook the race issue and other negative attitudes long entrenched in some of their communities and cast their vote for him? If he can’t get enough of their votes, he is not likely to win. That’s what John Kerry found out in 2004.

There is no doubt that right now we are watching history being made in this country, but Obama and Biden can’t spend too much time talking about it. They’ll have to leave that job to the commentators from our ubiquitous media and to the historians in their books. The job of Obama and Biden is winning an election. The middle class of all races and ethnic backgrounds in this country are struggling right now. The income spread between rich and poor is widening at an enormous rate, and we have far too much poverty for a nation that is supposed to be rich. That’s where the emphasis has got to be.

Thanks for tuning into Mind Check. For a look at my other writing, see the website http://www.sasaftwrites.com. Please note that my latest book, Murdoch McLoon And His Windmill Boat, is now available. You’ll learn more about it at the sasaftwrites website.

Copyright © 2008 by Stephen Alan Saft